RFID market grows 17% in one year

The RFID market, which includes tags, readers, software and services, for passive and active RFID – will grow from $7.88-billion in 2013 to $9.2-billion in 2014, according to research conducted by IDTechEx. Most growth is due to active RFID/RTLS systems, interrogators and then tags, in terms of total money spent, says IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das.

Passive UHF tags see rapid growth, from a total of just over 3-billion tags in 2013 to 3.9-billion tags in 2014. IDTechEx find that 2.48-billion passive HF tags will be sold in 2014, although at a much higher average sales price than passive UHF tags, so the money spent on HF tags will be almost ten times more. The highest volume sector for passive UHF systems is retail apparel, which still has some way to go with RFID penetrating only about 7% of the total addressable market for apparel in 2014.

After extensive interviews with suppliers, IDTechEx found that there are now emerging or established leaders in most positions of the value chain across the different technologies – yet still very few companies have sales of more than $100 million.

The report shows that the RFID market will reach $30.2-billion in 2024. This research was conducted for the report RFID forecasts, players and opportunities 2014-2024 which provides the key data and analysis in all the main applications, giving an unprecedented level of insight into the total RFID industry and what is really happening.